In today’s complex and regulated environment, businesses need to focus on building more secure solutions that deliver value to their customers, partners, and shareholders—both in the cloud and on-premises.

Microsoft has been building enterprise software for decades and running some of the largest online services in the world. We draw from this experience to keep making SharePoint and OneDrive more secure for users, by implementing and continuously improving security-aware software development, operational management, and threat-mitigation practices that are essential to the strong protection of your services and data.

SharePoint and OneDrive are uniquely positioned to help you address these evolving security challenges. To begin with, Microsoft has continued to evolve with new standards and regulations. This has been a guiding principle as we think about security for SharePoint and OneDrive. Right alongside that principle is this one: There is no security without usability. If security gets in the way of productivity, users will find a different, less secure way to do their work.

At Microsoft Ignite 2018 we announced many of the new capabilities that are available now and coming soon to Office 365.

NOTE This is the first of regular monthly updates for what’s new and what’s coming with security, compliance, and administration in SharePoint and OneDrive.

Unified Labels

Unified labels in Microsoft 365 provide you a more integrate and consistent approach when creating labels and configuring and applying policies to protect and govern information across devices, applications, cloud, and on-premises locations. Unified labels provide a single location to create and configure data sensitivity labels for both Azure Information Protection and Office 365, so you can set up protection and retention labels and policies in the same place.

Unified labels in Microsoft 365 are available now.

SharePoint site classification labels

Across your organization, you probably have different types of content that require different security requirements to comply with industry regulations and internal policies.

Using Microsoft Information protection labels you can now apply consistent security and access policies to SharePoint Sites based on the sensitivity of the site. You can create sensitivity labels and associate them with policies in the new Microsoft 365 Security and Compliance Center. You can then apply these labels to files, emails, groups, Sites and Teams to automatically enforce consistent policies across your content.

SharePoint site classification labels will begin rolling out to Targeted Release in December 2018.

Automation application of retention labels

Data is your company’s most important asset, with the automatic application of retention labels you can ensure your most important assets are compliant to meet your corporate or regulatory requirements. These retention labels can be created by importing the content types that you already use in SharePoint to help streamline the application of retention policies across all your content in SharePoint.

Content type to label support will begin rolling out in November 2018.

Label analytics

Information is growing at exponential rates and we’re making it easier for you to stay informed on how retention and sensitivity labels are being used to classify, retain, and protect your organization’s content in the cloud.

Using label analytics you can now get insights into how content is being labeled, including which labels are used most, and what emails and files they’re being applied to and also explore user activity to identify who’s been applying labels, investigate unusual trends, and more.

Label analytics will begin rolling out in Q4 2018.

File plans

Office 365 already provides data governance labels to establish rules for records management and retention. Later this year we’ll be augmenting those with hierarchical file plans, allowing you to manage a range of retention labels with identifiers, departments, categories, statutory references and more. File plans can be exported from Office 365 for easy editing in Excel, and then reimported to update label rules.

Files plans will begin to be available in Q4 2018.

Files Restore for SharePoint and Microsoft Teams

Data loss is non-negotiable, today we announced Files Restore for SharePoint and Microsoft Teams.

Files Restore is now available for SharePoint document libraries, protecting your shared files in SharePoint, Teams, Outlook groups, and Yammer groups connected to Office 365 groups and uses the same recovery capabilities that protect your personal files in OneDrive for Business.

Files Restore is a complete self-service recovery solution that allows site administrators restore document libraries from any point in time during the last 30 days and rewind changes using activity data to find the exact moment to revert to.

Files Restore for SharePoint and Microsoft Teams will begin rolling out to Targeted Release in December 2018.

With multi-geo capabilities for SharePoint you can have a single Office 365 tenant that can span across multiple geos and enable a unified communication and collaboration experience across your global organization. You can migrate various on-premises satellites data silos into a single Office 365 tenant and at the same time meet your data residency needs. Your users are now connected to the people and content that matter most, regardless of where they work.

For IT, you can use powerful Office 365 admin tools to easily create and manage satellite sites and if needed move user data between geos to meet your data residency business needs. Get reports on where each user’s data is stored and audit trail of activities of all users in your global enterprise. Tailor sharing, security, and compliance policies separately for each geo—all from a familiar admin experience.

External sharing integration with Azure AD B2B

Last year at Ignite we introduced a new external sharing experience where recipients could access the shared content in a secure way by entering a one-time passcode sent to their email address without the need of creating or remembering passwords. This year, we’re taking it a step further by integrating the one-time passcode sign-in experience with the Azure AD B2B platform. This enables external users to exist in your Azure AD directory as Guests which can be managed in the way you are already familiar with. This integration also brings the one-time passcode experience when sharing SharePoint sites and lists with external user.

SharePoint admin center updates

At Microsoft Ignite, in addition to our security and compliance news, we announced several exciting new features coming to the new SharePoint admin center.

Make the new admin center your default admin center…

The new SharePoint admin experience provides a completely revamped SharePoint admin center that draws heavily on our modern principles… an administrative console designed to help IT achieve more, so their users can achieve more. If you’ve enjoyed using the new SharePoint admin center up until today, you now have the option to make the new SharePoint admin center your default experience while still being able to go back to the classic admin center if you need to.

Improved management experience for group-connected sites

Office 365 Groups is a service that works with the Office 365 tools you use already so you can collaborate with your teammates when writing documents, creating spreadsheets, working on project plans, scheduling meetings, or sending email. Now we’re making it easier to manage group-connected sites by allowing SharePoint administrators manage ownership, change sharing settings, and delete and restore sites.

Simplified hub site creation and association

Sites and data grow as your organization grows. With SharePoint hub sites, you can bring flexible, dynamic building blocks to your organization’s intranet – connecting collaboration and communication. Now in the SharePoint admin center, you can manage existing hub sites in addition to creating hub sites and associating existing sites with a hub site. These capabilities also extend to multi-geo scenarios.

Quickly customize and control the site creation experience

Creating sites is one of the most common tasks an administrator performs in many SharePoint environments, and we’ve made it easier to customize and control how sites are created.

New site creation options allow you to create sites on behalf of users and configure common settings such as language, time zone, and storage limit and for classic and communication sites you can now also specify their managed path.

In addition to these site creation controls, you now can specify global settings that apply to all site when they’re created too such as the time zone and site creation path and for organizations who want to control the site creation experience, you can enable or disable self-service site creation.

Improved site management experience

In response to your feedback, we’ve added more management controls across site management and storage, including a simplified view of your tenant-level storage usage and limit and the ability to switch to manual site storage management.

Additionally, in many cases you may want or need more than one or two administrators for a site collection. In response to your feedback, we’ve now enabled the use of security groups as a site collection administrator in SharePoint Online.

Finally, we’re making it simpler to execute site actions by moving many of the common actions to the command bar rather than the site information panel.

The freedom to work fluidly, independent of location has become an expectation as has the freedom to access email and documents from anywhere on any device—and that experience is expected to be seamless. However, data loss is non-negotiable, and overexposure to information can have lasting legal and compliance implications. IT needs to make sure that corporate data is secure while enabling users to stay productive in today’s mobile-first world, where the threat landscape is increasingly complex and sophisticated.

Innovation in the cloud drives tremendous business value, and it delivers new capabilities to the IT professionals who work tirelessly to support, configure, administer, and secure their organizations’ content and services.Office 365 empowers you to support sophisticated requirements for security and compliance, to manage day-to-day operations, and to maximize the value of Office 365 to people in your organization.

We’ve built Office 365 with global scale, exceptional reliability, and support for compliance across industries and geographies on top of intelligent security that keeps your service and content protected and private, we give you granular and dynamic controls so that you can manage access and distribution of your organization’s sensitive information. We’ve equipped you with detailed activity and usage reports. And we’ve brought the innovations born in Office 365 to SharePoint Server 2019? with out-of-the-box capabilities and connected, hybrid experiences.

Today at Microsoft Ignite 2018 we announced many of the new capabilities that are available now and coming soon to Office 365 and while our list of news is too big for a single blog, here you’ll find a summary of these announcements.

SharePoint site classification labels

Across your organization, you probably have different types of content that require different security requirements to comply with industry regulations and internal policies.

Using Microsoft Information protection labels you can now apply consistent security and access policies to SharePoint Sites based on the sensitivity of the site. You can create sensitivity labels and associate them with policies in the new Microsoft 365 Security and Compliance Center. You can then apply these labels to files, emails, groups, Sites and Teams to automatically enforce consistent policies across your content.

Automation application of retention labels

Data is your company’s most important asset, with the automatic application of retention labels you can ensure your most important assets are compliant to meet your corporate or regulatory requirements. These retention labels can be created by importing the content types that you already use in SharePoint to help streamline the application of retention policies across all your content in SharePoint.

Label analytics

Information is growing at exponential rates and we’re making it easier for you to stay informed on how retention and sensitivity labels are being used to classify, retain, and protect your organization’s content in the cloud.

Using label analytics you can now get insights into how content is being labeled, including which labels are used most, and what emails and files they’re being applied to and also explore user activity to identify who’s been applying labels, investigate unusual trends, and more.

Files Restore for SharePoint and Microsoft Teams

Data loss is non-negotiable, today we announced Files Restore for SharePoint and Microsoft Teams.

Files Restore is now available for SharePoint document libraries, protecting your shared files in SharePoint, Teams, Outlook groups, and Yammer groups connected to Office 365 groups and uses the same recovery capabilities that protect your personal files in OneDrive for Business.

Files Restore is a complete self-service recovery solution that allows site administrators restore document libraries from any point in time during the last 30 days and rewind changes using activity data to find the exact moment to revert to.

SharePoint admin center updates

While our new user experiences are designed to be simpler, more intuitive, and more powerful we also believe administration should be just as simple, just as intuitive, and just as powerful. To that aim, we’re adding new controls and capabilities SharePoint Admin center to include:

The ability to manage all sites, including group connected team sites, communication sites, and hub sites

Controls such as Device Access and Sharing Policies through a richer menu to manage and control how information is accessed and shared.

A new command surface that provides an actionable command bar, hub site and classification management control

Enhancements to the site creation experience empowering admins with more settings and control such as storage and classification

Several new options in the settings page including ability to control the defaults for user created sites

A new simple way to track and manage tenant level storage and site level storage limits

In addition to these new capabilities, you’ll soon be able to also change site URLs and manage site creation settings.

With multi-geo capabilities for SharePoint you can have a single Office 365 tenant that can span across multiple geos and enable a unified communication and collaboration experience across your global organization. You can migrate various on-premises satellites data silos into a single Office 365 tenant and at the same time meet your data residency needs. Your users are now connected to the people and content that matter most, regardless of where they work.

For IT, you can use powerful Office 365 admin tools to easily create and manage satellite sites and if needed move user data between geos to meet your data residency business needs. Get reports on where each user’s data is stored and audit trail of activities of all users in your global enterprise. Tailor sharing, security, and compliance policies separately for each geo—all from a familiar admin experience.

External sharing integration with Azure AD B2B

Last year at Ignite we introduced a new external sharing experience where recipients could access the shared content in a secure way by entering a one-time passcode sent to their email address without the need of creating or remembering passwords. This year, we’re taking it a step further by integrating the one-time passcode sign-in experience with the Azure AD B2B platform. This enables external users to exist in your Azure AD directory as Guests which can be managed in the way you are already familiar with. This integration also brings the one-time passcode experience when sharing SharePoint sites and lists with external user.

SharePoint Migration Tool Improvements

In addition to these capabilities to help streamline your journey to Office 365 we announced several new capabilities we’re bringing to the SharePoint Migration Tool.

The SharePoint Migration Toolis designed to simplify your journey to the cloud through a free, simple, and fast solution to migrate content from on-premises SharePoint sites and file shares to SharePoint or OneDrive in Office 365. The SharePoint Migration Tool allows you to accelerate your journey to Office 365 overcoming obstacles typically associated with migration projects.

With the SharePoint Migration Tool you can evaluate, address, and migrate the information that matters the most to your organization, the libraries, lists, and now complete SharePoint 2013 sites that form the foundation of the SharePoint experience. Using the SharePoint Migration Tool you can start your migration today and take advantage of the full suite of features and security capabilitiesthat Office 365 offers.

In addition to adding support for full site migrations with the SharePoint Migration Tool, we’re also refreshing the user experience and have made generally available its Windows PowerShell cmdlets to support automating your migration to Office 365.

Thank you again for your support of SharePoint and OneDrive. We look forward to your continued feedback on UserVoice and hope to connect with you at Ignite or another upcoming Microsoft or community led event.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: When will SharePoint site classification labels be available?

A:SharePoint site classification labels will begin rolling out to Targeted Release in December 2018.

Q: When will Files Restore for SharePoint and Microsoft Teams be available?

A:Files Restore for SharePoint and Microsoft Teams will begin rolling out to Targeted Release in December 2018.

Q: When will the updates to the SharePoint admin center begin rolling out?

This summer we introduced a consistent, coherent sharing experience across the Web and desktop – these improvements allow you to share Office 365 files directly from File Explorer on PC and Finder on Mac, in addition to the latest versions of Office on the desktop and Office 365 web experiences. The updates we made provide a simplified sharing experience, so you can share files and folders easily with partners both internal and external, while retaining the right level of security – so whether you share on the web, in Explorer on Windows 10 and Windows 7, or Finder or the Mac, the sharing experience is secure, consistent and simple.

While we’ve made the sharing experience consistent across these endpoints we also understand that data loss and leakage are non-negotiable and to comply with business standards and industry regulations, organizations need to protect sensitive information and prevent its inadvertent disclosure.

To ensure your sensitive data remains that way we’re excited to announce that we’ve extended sharing to include DLP policy tips across OneDrive, SharePoint, Word, Excel and PowerPoint on PC, Mac and Web, so whether you’re working on the web or the desktop, you can remain informed with a consistent policy tip experience as you share files.

SharePoint Online

Microsoft Word

By bringing DLP policy tips into the sharing experience you can both block the sharing action as well as use the sharing dialog as a platform to help understand why an is action is blocked regardless of where you’re working.

Governments around the world are strengthening laws and regulations to protect citizens’ data, preserve national security, and protect business interests.

Last week at Microsoft Ignite we announced new Multi-Geo Capabilities in Office 365 to help ensure you remain compliant with services to include SharePoint, OneDrive, and Exchange.

The new Multi-Geo Capabilities in Microsoft 365 with SharePoint and OneDrive provide global organizations a solution to maximizing the value of Office 365, including SharePoint and OneDrive, while meeting data residency and compliance requirements.

Multi-geo capabilities provide you with a choice of geographical locations in which to store, manage, and secure your data by allowing a single Office 365 tenant to span multiple regions, storing data on a per-user or per-site basis. So, whether you’re adding a new user to your organization or need to move an existing user, as well as their data, seamlessly and transparently to that user, to a new region, new multi-geo capabilities are designed to address those needs.

In a multi-geo configuration, your Office 365 Tenant consists of a central, default location, such as North America and one or more satellite locations. In this scenario, a single Tenant can span across multiple locations ensuring your data resides within the boundaries of each respective geo. Each geo in a multi-geo configuration is addressed with a unique Url specified when configuring the Office 365 Tenant, such as contosona or consotoeur to represent North America or Europe respectively.

Information about multi-geo enabled Tenants such as geo locations, groups, and user information, is mastered in Azure Active Directory (AAD). Since the Tenant information is mastered centrally and synchronized into each geo location, sharing and experiences involving anyone from your company contain global awareness. For example, a user whose preferred OneDrive data location in Europe, can share with users in North America or other configured geo locations, and discover content created across the tenancy using services such as search and Office Delve. In addition, independent policies can be configured at each geo location to include explicit sharing policies, eDiscovery, etc.

Multi-Geo capabilities for OneDrive is in private preview today. If you’re interested and want to learn more visit the links below.